Telecommunication outages prompt emergency fears

Mallacoota residents say they are worried problems with telecommunications over the past week could affect their ability to respond to an emergency.

Last week, mobile phones, and the Internet were down for seven hours one evening, and landline phones could only make local calls.

The 000 service was also unable to be used from landlines.

Karina Stone from Mallacoota says emergency service pages were also affected by the outage.

She says residents are worried they will not be able to contact authorities during an emergency if there is another serious outage.

"From here on in there is going to be a lot more people in town and we are a really remote community and we're surrounded by hundreds of thousands of hectares of bush and we need the notification the ABC, we need the emergency services notification from police and fire brigades, we really need those services to be online all the time," she said.

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